“Gods, she’s going to talk forever. You know she’s a storyteller, right? She relishes this kind of thing.”
I cut her a glare but am surprised at the wry smile on her lips, the ease of her posture. Maybe she’s only humoring Calvin by playing along. Or maybe telling her story offered a sense of liberation. Whatever the case, I must admit it sort of feels good, having a casual conversation for once. Not only that, but one where we exchange dark truths without fear of condemnation.
“At least leave the props,” she says.
“I wasn’t planning on using them.” I roll my eyes, but I realize how close my fingers were to reaching for them, my two cloth hearts tucked in my bodice. Not for any other reason but comfort. I always feel most comfortable telling stories while my hands are busy, hence the trouble I once found myself in while decorating stolen silk. But I’m not going to speak fiction this time; it would feel disingenuous after what Harlow and Calvin confessed. And while it is daytime, we are nonetheless in the woods. Shades may be relegated to the shadows beyond the clearing, but I’d rather not draw one anywhere near me with art and lies.
That doesn’t mean I can’t add a little flourish.
“Mine is a story of a woman who lost her heart,” I say, grinning as Harlow throws her head back with a grumble. “Mine is a tale of the treachery of love.”
Chapter Nine
Inana
“It was a day for celebration when the villagers of Dunway learned we would soon receive a Holy Brazier,” I say. “While everyone else anticipated protection from the Shades, I celebrated for a different reason. For the day we received our brazier, my fiancé would come home.”
Calvin’s eyes drop to my hands, perhaps seeking a wedding band. He won’t find one. Not even the ghost of an indent from a ring now lost graces my finger, for our engagement never culminated in an exchange of rings. Ours was a secret affair, one my love insisted on keeping to ourselves until he finished military service at the capital.
“Four years he’d been gone,” I say. “Four years in service to King Kaelum and hardly a word between us. I’d received a few letters during the first year, but they grew more sporadic after that. I held tight to the promises he’d made, reminding myself he was doing this for us. You see, he wanted to make a name for himself before we made our engagement public. That isn’t to say I was always full of faith. Sometimes, in my loneliest hours, I wondered if he was ashamed of me. Perhaps he’d been ashamed of me all along, and that was why he wanted to make a name for himself first, so that no one would dare question his choice of bride.”
“Why do you think he was ashamed of you?” Harlow asks, her prior teasing gone.
“I was the village seamstress, an already dubious occupation for its ties to art. But as you know, so long as artisans stick to time-honored patterns and keep from straying into creativity, we don’t attract Shades.” I don’t mention how stifled I felt by this. It was tedious sewing the same patterns day in and day out, in the same bland shades. Only the Sacred Cities see a vast array of fashion and architecture, which I didn’t know until I first set foot in Nalheim. Outside those silver walls, we live in simple dwellings identical to those that were built hundreds of years ago. Creative work, even the most innocuous kind, is done only during daylight hours, under strict regulations.
“Seamstress,” Calvin says with a grimace. “Might as well have been a witch as far as your neighbors were concerned, eh?”
He’s exaggerating, but he’s not exactly wrong. Magic falls under the same umbrella as art, but it’s perhaps even more taboo. While astrotheurgy was commonplace before One Hundred Days of Darkness, it’s now forbidden to everyone except the highest-ranking Sinless and the church. Not much is made public about magic, but I’ve gleaned that it once was used in harmony with the gods. Practitioners would invoke divine energies by drawing astrotheurgical diagrams, ritual circles intricately adorned with elemental shapes and the gods’ planetary symbols. After One Hundred Days of Darkness, magic in unholy hands was named a sin.
As a child, I craved a peek at a diagram, desperate to know what one looked like. Two years ago, I saw one. The day my story takes place.
“My village saw me as a witch, indeed,” I say. “I lived alone, separate from my parents even though I was unmarried. I worked in what was considered a tainted field. But when we received the news that Dunway was deemed devout enough to be rewarded with a Holy Brazier, I was certain my neighbors would see I was just as pious as the rest of them, just as deserving of the good fortune King Kaelum had chosen to bestow upon us. Four years of missing my beloved were finally coming to an end, in the most spectacular way. Our newly appointed duke would escort home our men who’d left for the military. Myfiancé would return at last and we’d have nothing standing in the way of our love.”
I drop my gaze to the crackling flames roaring in the firepit. My voice takes on a bitter edge as I explain the next part.
“I was on my way to the celebratory procession to welcome our new duke when the guards ambushed me. They were unfamiliar men, their uniforms too fine for common citizens. They marched me through town, away from the main road where the procession would be held, and toward our run-down jail. I called out to my neighbors, fellow villagers I’d known my whole life, but they refused to look my way. I was locked in a cell, my wrists tied with rope and affixed to the wall behind me. The guards shut me in without a word of explanation. Hours passed, and not even my parents came to look for me. I lost track of time. The sun was still bright when—finally—my fiancé came.”
Calvin and Harlow watch me with eager expressions. Even Bard lifts his head to assess me through the straggly black-and-silver strands that hang over his forehead.
For once I’m not lost in the joy of enchanting my audience. There’s a sliver of delight in my heart, but the shadows of my past are too thick to allow it to grow. Telling my story like this, baring the truth, is so different from the tale I spun at the Wretched Lair. It isn’t a bittersweet story of heartache and hope. Only rage. Regret. Hatred.
I continue. “When my beloved entered my cell, I wept with joy. He’d come to save me and he’d wrap me in his arms before my next breath. Yet breathe I did, and never did I feel those arms come around me. I forced my tears to abate so I could clear my eyes. Perhaps I’d merely hallucinated his presence, seen what I wanted to see. But there he was, the same man who’d left me with a passionate kiss and a promise of a dazzling future together four years prior. He was dressed in a fine suit of white and gold. His military uniform, I assumed. So why didn’t he close the distance between us? Why did he merely stand there with a gold bowl in his gloved hands and such a cold look on his face? Why didn’t he reach for me?”
My throat tightens at the memory. The way terror crept upon me as I studied him with new eyes. He set down the wide, shallow bowl, andI realized what it was. Saw the astrotheurgical diagram etched inside it. It was even more beautiful and more intricate than I ever could have imagined, and I couldn’t feel an ounce of joy about that.
“He didn’t reach for me,” I say, a harsh tremble in my voice, “because he hadn’t come to rescue me. He came to…”
I swallow hard, partly to steady my voice but also to take a moment to select my words carefully. Some truths, like the cost of lighting the Holy Braziers, are considered treason to confess. Everyone knows Sinless of all ranks consume human blood, but what they don’t know is what sets the dukes and royals apart from the Sinless gentry. It’s more than the fact that the former can perform solar astrotheurgy; it’s how they gain access to that magic.
“The man I once loved no longer cast a shadow,” I say, “and his canines were as sharp as knives. I was chosen as a sacrifice for our new duke.”
Harlow’s eyes widen in realization. “Your fiancé was turned Sinless?”
“Your new duke…was Henry Berkham.” Calvin says the name under his breath.
I stiffen, rage bristling up my spine. So he knows of the Duke of Dunway. I haven’t heard a damn thing about my hometown since I escaped, and I’ve had no desire to. I doubt I could contain my revulsion at hearing how well my former fiancé is doing. But there’s another reason I’ve avoided all news about my village…
The only way Henry could have formalized his appointment as Duke of Dunway is if he succeeded in taking a sacrifice. I thwarted his first attempt in my escape. My survival means someone else died in my stead.
